39. Lucas
39
LUCAS
I didn’t see Jayden’s car when I pulled up to the little coffee shop a mile from the house. Figuring I must’ve beat him there, I headed inside. Only to stop dead when I saw Kyle sitting at a table by the window.
Shit.
There was no chance this was a coincidence. I was going to bury Jayden in a shallow grave under his beloved hammock when I got home.
“What.” I sat down across from Kyle. Might as well get this over with.
“Coffee?” he stated, not quite an offer.
I squinted at his cup. “Yes, it is. Want to tell me what this is about?”
He sighed, leaning back in his chair, looking out the window. “It’s about Tori. And a little about me.”
Great. Because I just loved hearing about the two of them being involved in any way. “Why am I here?”
“First, take a listen to this.” He slid his phone over to me. “Do you have earbuds?”
“Yeah.” I fished them out of my pocket. Listening to low instrumental music helped me study sometimes.
It took me a few moments to connect my earbuds to his phone, and during that time, my mind offered a half-dozen reasons why I should get up and walk right out of here, but I didn’t.
I pressed play on an audio file and listened to Kyle explain exactly how he’d cheated on his papers. And then the incredibly crass thing he said about Tori.
“God, you’re a pig.”
Kyle nodded. “That seems to be the consensus.”
“So, this was their evidence?”
“They played it right in the middle of the fucking English Department conference room.”
“She had to hear that with her professor and her advisor right there?” After I beat Kyle to a pulp, I was going to find Tori, take her in my arms, and never let her go.
“Her advisor is useless,” Kyle growled.
My anger was ratcheting up by the second. “How could you do that to her? How could you say that to her?”
“It’s easy. I didn’t, and I didn’t.”
“Really? Because it sounded just like you.”
“Yeah, it did. Which is why I came to you.”
It took me a second to understand. “You’re saying this audio was faked?”
“Is it possible?”
My racing thoughts couldn’t keep up. “Yeah, it’s possible, but…” It just sounded so much like him. Not just his voice, tone, and inflection. The language, the attitude—those things were completely on-brand for him, too. “You’re sure someone didn’t just catch you on a bad day when you were ranting?”
“I never said those things. Never even thought them.” Kyle sounded tired. “This is your field. How would someone do this?”
I forced myself to focus on the issue at hand, not how Tori must feel. “Cloning a voice isn’t that hard, at least not through AI synthesis. Whoever did it would need samples of your voice, like real recordings. And the voice cloning software, and a TTS model…”
“You lost me.”
I cut to the chase. “Yes, it’s possible.”
“Shit.”
“Who would go through the trouble to do this to you, though?”
“You mean because I’m such a nice guy that I couldn’t possibly have ever pissed anyone off?”
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
Kyle raked his fingers through his hair. “At this point, it doesn’t matter, but I’d like to know how they did this.”
“If they—wait, why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because I’m not going to defend myself. I’ll plead guilty and flunk the class. They’re not going to penalize Tori if the student she’s tutoring has cheated without her knowledge.”
“You’ll be kicked off the team.”
“So? I only have two more years to play, anyway.”
That didn’t make any sense. Kyle lived for baseball.
“But wouldn’t it be better to prove that your voice was cloned? Then Tori won’t be in trouble, and you can stay on the team.”
Kyle shook his head. “What were the odds I was going to pass that class, anyway? Let alone graduate. This way, I won’t take her down with me. Plus, I’ll have some leverage.”
“Leverage?”
“Yeah. Like if I agree to go quietly and not drag things out for either department, I can make some demands.”
“Like what?”
“That she not be punished, that she can still take the job at the writing center that she wants so badly. Oh yeah, and that she gets a better fucking advisor.”
“Did she tell you she wants a new advisor?”
Kyle spread his hands. “Why wouldn’t she? That guy’s fighting against her, not for her.”
“So you’ve decided you know what’s best for her.”
Kyle frowned. “I thought you’d think this was a good idea. It helps her.”
Two weeks ago, I would’ve agreed with him. But Tori had shown me that the best way to support her was to stop making decisions on her behalf. Kyle needed to learn that, too.
“She wants to be a teacher. A high school teacher. How’s she going to feel if the very first time she tries to tutor someone—perhaps someone who acts like he’s still in high school—it ends like this?”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “I’m trying to do the right thing here, man.”
“She wants you to do well. I think you’re bowing out because it’s easier than giving it your best shot and possibly finding out it wasn’t enough.”
Kyle shot me a confused look. “That was my point.”
“No, it’s not. Your point was that you’re too dumb to pass the course, and I don’t buy that.”
“Excuse me? Haven’t you spent the last five years reminding me of how stupid I am?”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t make it true. Two people I trust, Tori and Jayden, both said you worked really hard on those papers. And that your grade for the first one was a B. So if you’re giving up based on the conclusion that you can’t pass, you might want to think again. Or better yet, talk to your tutor.”
Kyle was silent, and I hoped he was thinking about what I said. Then a question occurred to me. “If you’re just going to quit, why bother trying to prove it’s false?”
“If someone has the ability to clone my voice, they could make it say other things, right?”
I sat back in my chair. I hadn’t thought of that, but yeah, whoever did this could do worse.
“Say I did stay on the team. Couldn’t they just pretend to record me saying some racist shit or something like that? Then I’d be kicked off the team anyway—plus, that would be a really fun thing to come up at job interviews in the future. Or they could use my voice to trick someone I care about.”
I didn’t ask who that might be—it was pretty obvious. “Okay, you’re right.”
“Can you prove that this recording is doctored?”
“Yeah, probably. It’ll take a while, though, and the audio quality’s not great. Where’d you get it?”
“An assistant coach came to the meeting. He got it afterwards and sent it to me.”
“It would help if we had the original file that was shared with the school, but there should be some tells on this version. Send it to me and I can look for artifacts. Maybe find a mismatch between waveforms—it would help if you’d record yourself talking for a few minutes so I could compare the two.”
“Yeah, sure.”
I pushed his phone back to him. “Just send me the file.”
“Yeah. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“No, I mean it,” he said, his tone serious. “Whether you’re doing this for me or for her—I appreciate it.”
Wow, that was unexpected. And it was probably my cue to leave before we started shouting at each other again.
But when I pushed up from my chair, Kyle spoke. “Wait.”
“What?”
He hung his head, cursing under this breath. “Shit. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do or not.”
“What?”
He sighed. “Or maybe it’s the wrong thing for the right reason or some kind of crap like that.”
“What’re you talking about?” It would be really nice if he’d get to the point.
“I never slept with her,” he said quietly.
I bristled. “You want some kind of award for that? I’m sure you’ll get in her pants if you try hard enough, with your track record.” Why the fuck was he bringing up sleeping with Tori now?
Suddenly, his face changed. “Not Tori. Natalie. I never slept with Natalie.”
My blood heated. What the fuck was wrong with him to lie about something like that now? “Yeah, right. Even though you said you did. And she said you did. But let me guess, you two were just in your bedroom playing checkers, right?”
“No, she wanted me to fuck her, but I didn’t.”
“Stop. Just stop. This is all ancient history, and unless you’re bringing it up because you like constantly arguing, the matter is settled.”
“It’s settled because I’ve just told you the truth. She wanted me to sleep with her. I didn’t.”
His fucking audacity was making it hard to think. “And why would she want that? Because you’re so irresistible that women will throw away a three-year relationship just for a chance to fuck you?”
“No.” He rested his forehead on his palm. “She wanted out of the relationship.”
This lying piece of shit was the biggest waste of space ever. “Just shut the fuck up and never talk to me again.”
“You needed to know the truth.”
I wanted to hit him so fucking badly. He and his lies were like cancer. “It isn’t the truth, and even if it was, why now?”
“Because I see some of the same patterns between you and Tori.”
My breath caught, but he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. “Don’t lie about her, too.”
“I’m not going to. You and Natalie were like an old married couple by senior year. You did everything together. Slept together. Spent each day together. Finished each other’s sentences. You fucking suffocated her, dude. Or maybe you mutually suffocated each other. She wanted out.”
That wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. She would’ve talked to me. But all I said, as a blinding headache hit me was, “Why?”
“I don’t know, but weren’t you going to do the long-distance thing when you went to college? Long distance isn’t easy. And you were each other’s firsts—for basically everything, right? So maybe she wanted to spread her wings a little. Get some more experience under her belt.”
Shit. Was he right? But how could he be? I’d known Natalie better than anyone—just like she’d known me better than anyone. Wouldn’t she have told me if she wanted to break up? But that’s not what I asked. “Did she ever love me?”
“She didn’t confide in me, she just tried to get me to fuck her. But it sure as shit looked like you two were in love, at least to me.” He sighed. “I’ve had a lot of time to think since then, and I think maybe I get it now.”
I waited. Part of me wanted to yell at him for presuming to know anything about her. About us. Another part of me needed to hear what he had to say—and at the same time, didn’t want to.
“It’s hard to crush someone, especially when you care about them. So you start to think that maybe it’ll be easier if you get them to break up with you. I’ve done that a time or two with a woman, and I’m not proud of it. I think Natalie wanted to sleep with me so that you’d dump her—and then she’d be spared the pain of having to dump you. Which I know you don’t want to hear it, but that seems pretty fucking cowardly.”
“You’re right, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Right. Because it’s much easier on you if it’s all my fault.”
Shit. He was saying exactly what Tori had said to me that night after she’d kissed all of us at the library study group. That didn’t make it true, though.
Except now there was one person I trusted—and the one person who knew my history with Natalie—both saying the same thing.
“Why did you lie? Why’d you say you slept with her and take the blame?”
Kyle sighed again, resting his forearms on the table. “The one thing I never doubted was that you loved her. I knew you’d be crushed that she cheated or tried to. So the way I saw it—you could end up hating the girl you loved, or you could hate the guy you already couldn’t fucking stand. So I figured that might be a better option for you, though both sucked.”
That was a lot to process, and I didn’t want to believe it. But the logical side of my brain was resurfacing through the anger. What would the last year and a half have been like if I’d blamed Natalie instead of Kyle? It would’ve added new and awful layers to the incredible pain I felt after the breakup. Shit. “So I’ve spent the last eighteen months hating you for something you didn’t do?”
“Well, yeah. That was the plan. But don’t forget, we didn’t get along before that, either. So it’s not like we would’ve been best buds if she hadn’t come to my room.” Kyle’s voice was flat, as if it didn’t matter.
But it did. “Maybe… without that with Natalie… maybe we would’ve eventually grown out of it. Or gotten past it somehow.”
He looked doubtful. “Blended families suck under the best of circumstances. And you and I already didn’t like each other when our parents met, so it wasn’t great even before they got married.”
“I had a role in that,” I said softly. “I played up to your dad. Emphasized my achievements. Downgraded yours.”
“I didn’t fucking have any, except on the field.”
“Still… I threw you under the bus. My dad died when I was just a kid, and it felt good to have my new stepfather be proud of me. But having it be at the expense of his son—that was a shitty thing for me to do. Selfish, too.”
Kyle looked out the window. “The way you just described it makes it sound like that was on my dad as much as you. Maybe you wouldn’t have tried to throw me under the bus if I hadn’t been so mean to you at school.”
“Either way, it’s not something I’m proud of.”
“Me either.” He picked up his coffee cup, only to realize it was empty.
“So, what do we do now?”
“I don’t know. I guess you take some time to process all this shit I just dumped on you. And I guess I probably should talk to Tori about what she wants me to do. And at some point, if you’re still willing, you look into the audio file or whatever it is you have to do.”
“All right.” That was what I’d do then.